How To Get Your Story, Event or News Published on Postpartum Progress

I hope you don’t mind a little housekeeping chat, but this is really important. Especially for those of you who run PPD support organizations, or who are volunteers or professionals with news to share, or are moms who want to share their stories, or are researchers. Which means pretty much all of you.

I have a dream that one day we’ll be able to raise enough money to be more than one person, but for now it’s just me. Me, and some freaking amazing contributors and guest posters for whom I am ridiculously grateful — especially Kate Kripke, Kimberly Morand and Robin Farr — because without them I have no idea where we’d be. Still, we all work on a volunteer basis to keep this amazing resource called Postpartum Progress going.

If you have a piece of news, or an event or a PPD story, you want it on Postpartum Progress. That’s awesome given how many years it took me to convince all of you that you should share your news with us. I’m so very glad and honored that you want Postpartum Progress to cover it. I couldn’t be more thrilled about that.

At the same time, I notice you get frustrated with me if you don’t hear back, or if I don’t cover your story. Sooo … I want to share some basic guidelines about Postpartum Progress so you can get a better idea of what I respond and don’t respond to, how long it takes, how to get your events listed, etc. I’m hoping you’ll find this guide helpful.

Emails

All of the email for Postpartum Progress comes to me. We get quite a bit — I probably get a minimum of 300 emails a day — and I’m glad that so many of you are reaching out to us.

In terms of our top priority, it’s responding to emails from moms. I try to respond to you as soon as possible if you are a mom who needs the answer to a question or is looking for a resource or an understanding word. Sometimes it takes me a few days, but we really do care about you. Really. (If, on the other hand, you’re sending in your story simply to submit it as a guest post, or sending in something you just want us to read, it will take much longer. See below for more info on that.)

Everyone else comes after the moms, and I get to your emails as quickly as I can. I appreciate your patience and understanding on that!!

We generally only publish submissions from moms who have or had a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder, and from specialists in the field of perinatal mood or anxiety disorders. If you’re not one of those two types of people, it makes it a lot less likely that your story will be published here.

I get quite a lot of submissions of personal stories about PPD and related illnesses and I can’t guarantee we’ll use every one. If something isn’t written to our writing standards, or is about a subject we’ve already recently covered, we aren’t likely to use it. At least not any time soon.

We do not respond to emails from people who write for content farms and want to submit stories. We also don’t publish stories from people who are trying to sell unproven remedies for PPD or write thinly-veiled PPD stories that are really just tools to market their products.

Because we get so many submissions, it may take me weeks, and sometimes months, to get to yours if you submit it. It’s not because I don’t want to or don’t plan to read. I do. As many of you can attest, we sometimes publish things months after you send them to us. That’s because I just hadn’t been able to get to it until then. So please don’t feel offended. The amount of reading required to do this job is BEYOND MASSIVE. So we really are trying. Hang in there.

As for our editorial calendar, we don’t really have one I’m embarrassed to say. But, I often share topic ideas I’m interest in covering on our Facebook page, so you should be following us there to see what we’re working on or to make your own suggestions.

Events

These are the types of events we write about:

specialty training events and seminars for reproductive psychiatry and PPD

women’s mental health conferences and other meetings related to postpartum depression and other perinatal mood and anxiety disorders

larger PPD fundraising events (we can’t write about every one on every corner, but if it’s a major annual event or something significant we want to help you tell people about it)

If you don’t tell me about your event, I can’t tell everyone else about it. I’d love to be able to monitor every site and organization that does anything related to PPD, but I can’t. So you have to take it upon yourself to email me and tell me about your news or big upcoming event and I will do everything in my power to write about it. In your email, please include the basic information about the event – when, where, cost to participate, what or who the event benefits — and a link to a URL where people can register. Links are important. People need to have somewhere to go to learn more about you and how to join in with whatever you’re doing. Please do not attach a brochure, PDF or flyer in your email to me, because I can’t attach a brochure or flyer or PDF in a post. Just send me the info on the event within the email itself.

Whenever I put up a story that is a roundup of upcoming events, I invariably get a host of emails after the fact from people asking me why I didn’t include their event, too. Usually it’s because they didn’t send me an email to tell me about it in the first place. You have to tell me. Even if I did a story about the same event last year, you have to remind me again about the one this year. I’m sorry about that, but the truth is my brain hit its capacity about six years ago and everything that has been added to it since just spills out. Reminders are where it’s at!!

If you email me about your event and I don’t write about it, it’s probably because I just couldn’t get to it in time, and for that I apologize because we really do try to let everyone know about everything that’s going on.

Support groups

Again, you have to tell me if you have one otherwise I’m not going to know. Or tell me if the one that we list here has changed. And then as soon as I can I’ll get it fixed on our support group page.

To get your pic in the Warrior Moms Photo Album, just send in a jpeg. Include what state you live in, what illness you had and what year or years you had it.

I hope you find this helpful. If there are other questions you have about the workings of the site, please comment below. Let us know what they are. If you have an idea, a concern, something new you’d like to see here, or a question that wasn’t answered above, tell me. We don’t know what we don’t know!!